Browser Wars : Google Discontinues “No URL Bar” Feature In Chrome 15!

As we said before, Google is always known for it’s innovativeness. Isn’t it? Google is such a company which tries to spread their hand in every corner of Internet and grabs every opportunity to give more than expected.

Google Chrome, Google Search Engine, Google+ are few best examples we can give when speaking about Google. These are really a great products by them.

Google Chrome is one of the strongest player in Browser Wars and is strongly moving by acquiring more and more users from their rivals, Internet Explorer and Firefox. Users are moving towards Chrome because of the features it has and users find it as a best alternative browser!

If you all remember, we have shared a great change which Google team is making to Chrome to provide more browsing space to users. Yes, we are speaking about Google’s plan of killing URL bar in Chrome. Well, as a loyal Chrome browser user, @Tech18 team felt it as a best feature which can provide more space for what is expected out of browser.

But, Google has other plans! Google has quietly abandoned the idea of hiding the location bar to gain more pixel space for web content. Well removing this feature was just adding 2-3 lines of code, but Google said they have cancelled “Compact Navigation” flag and they aren’t going to include this as Chrome’s core feature.

Google discontinued this feature by removing following code in Chromium 94162 build.

While Google disabled the hidden switch to enable compact navigation as well, the code of the feature itself remains in Chrome. The only way for users to access this feature would be a developer version or nightly build of the browser that was published prior to July 26.

In a discussion thread comment, Google said,

Compact Nav prototype was meant to be a way for [Google] to try out a new form factor rather than be a permanent redesign. We don’t think that this is the optimal direction to take Chrome’s UI, so the experiment has ended and we’re removing the prototype.

When we had shared this update during the month of May, many of our readers liked it and even we agreed with them as it was something really different from prior releases. This feature was not required in PC – version of Chrome browser as we have larger screens. For tablets, yes it is useful!